Pugilist’s Training Tips: Choice of Weapons

This is a guest post from Oleg Fadeev who comes to us all the way from Nizhni Novgorod, Russia.

Hi all!

Today it’s time to visit our armory and have a look at what we have there. For the sake of a logical approach let’s divide our weapons into offensive and defensive means.

Offensive means

It is the simplest section for a boxer, actually. If you condition your knuckles and wrists properly you need no special “street” techniques (the pugilistic way of the hand conditioning you may find in my previous article about the Basics). All boxing strikes and punches which you practice in your gym are also good for the street fighting. The only thing to remember is that we shouldn’t use long series and combinations of strikes, just two or three strikes sequences: jab-cross, right cross-left hook and other basic boxing stuff. “The simpler – the better” is the main rule in the street.

Defensive means

This is far more complicated thing. Let me remind you that there are two main reasons which make us choose our defenses very carefully:

There are no gloves in the street.

The assailant can have concealed weapons which we haven’t noticed for some reason (bad lights, bad weather conditions and etc.) That can be different kinds of brass-knuckles, short knives, black-jacks or sappers.

Keeping in mind these two factors it is obvious that we can’t use “shield and cover” defenses because on the one hand our bare fists are too small to cover any significant area and on the other hand our cover won’t protect us from being hit by a black-jack for example. So we should exclude these types of defense from our pugilistic training. But don’t worry; we still have tons of effective stuff down here.

First of all, it is all your boxing body movements. Slips, ducks, shoulder rolls and etc. are as good in the street as they are in the ring. Actually it’ll be even easier to evade small fists instead of big boxing gloves.
For the second, it is parrying. We can parry a strike, we can parry a knife thrust, and we can parry everything.

For the third, it is blocking. Not very popular in the modern boxing blocking saved many lives in the old time prize fighting bouts. And once again, we can block everything be it a punch or a knife thrust. The rule is simple: shield and cover in the ring = blocking in the street. Interchange these techniques dependently. Some examples of blocking are present in the videos below.

Note: These videos are shot in a way that I don’t know what hand my partner will be striking with. We did this to show that blocking is a simple and spontaneous action.

Chuck Horton

Chuck Horton is a self-defense instructor located in Minnesota.
Growing up in a boxing family, Chuck quickly learned how to defend himself. He would spend countless hours in his father's gym - the West Duluth Boxing Club.
After high school, Chuck joined the army; during this time, however, he continued to box. When one of his fellow soldiers was diagnosed with cancer, Chuck Horton organized a charity boxing event.
This was Chuck's first experience as both a trainer and a promoter. It turned out to be a huge success; Chuck's team went 10-1 and he got George Foreman to speak at the event.
Since 1994, Chuck has been training fighters as a career. He started by training amateurs but soon moved up to training professionals as well.